While Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) currently dominates the thriving smartphone commodity display market, a number of Asian rivals are aiming to unseat the South Korean giant. Among them is Japan's Sharp Corp. (TYO:6753).

Sharp announced this week that it would be mass-producing a monstrous 443 ppi (pixels-per-inch) 1920x1080 pixel smartphone screen. The 5-inch screen could appear in devices as early as the holiday season, but will likely show up in greater quantities next year. The new display features a brand new pixel technology dubbed CG-Silicon, which Sharp promises brings smartphone displays in line with their full-size counterparts. Sharp's display likely makes use of the company's new "Igzo" power efficient thin-display tech, as well.

The release marks the latest round in a game of brinksmanship by Japan and South Korea's top display makers. Early this year South Korea's LG Electronics Inc. (KSC:066570) announced production of a similar 5-inch 440 ppi unit, which will likely launch in a similar window. LG calls its display technology "Retina" displays.

Sharp is thinking small with its latest 5-inch 1080 display. [Image Source: IntoMobile]

A third player is Japan's Toshiba Corp. (TYO:6502), which recently demoed a 498 ppi 6-inch display. Toshiba's display could be the most impressive of the bunch -- unfortunately it's not yet quite ready for the market.

The reason why high-dpi displays have the issue of either living with too small text or having to reduce the resolution is that high DPI in the PC world is not high enough.

PC high-dpi displays are at most 50% more pixels than a standard display. If you have a legacy application that doesn't scale well, you would see a huge improvement if the resolution was doubled, making everything half the normal size, and the OS could simply double the size of the window. Higher DPI displays would allow the OS to increase a Window by any arbitrary percentage and achieve a good result.

DPI is plenty high enough. And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "legacy" applications.

The first problem is that vast numbers of people, probably the vast majority, have no idea about going into their settings/preferences in Windows and changing the text size.

The second problem is that changing it there doesn't change all text everywhere...do that and the text on your icons on the desktop is big, but then if you go and launch your web browser the text is all still small. Sure, then you can go and fiddle with your scaling in your browser, but again, vast numbers of people don't know how to do that, and secondly it's a PITA. And people get scared when you tell them to go and change settings of any kind anyway.

It's infinitely easier for these people to just turn down their resolution...one action that makes their text big everywhere, and then they just live with their displays being "out of focus" and/or displaying things at the wrong aspect ratio. It's easier for them than doing things the "right way."

If MS put a button on the desktop that scaled all fonts in every application, maybe we wouldn't have this problem. But they didn't, and we do.